


Science is not a Competition

by andamiro (arysthaeniru)



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: For Science!, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-05
Updated: 2015-03-05
Packaged: 2018-03-16 12:46:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3488783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arysthaeniru/pseuds/andamiro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jirou isn’t quite sure how to specify to Atobe how much of a bad idea it was to make the japanese scientific community even more cutthroat than it had already been. Still, there are upsides to this fiasco. Namely one Inui Sadaharu who seems to be better than the whole lot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Science is not a Competition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Perkyandproud](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perkyandproud/gifts).



> Thanks go to my beta, thelaziesthufflepuff, for her amazing edits <3

Jirou sighed contently, as he slumped over his desk, his eyelashes fluttering shut as he found a comfortable position instantly. It was easy to wiggle a little, shoving the endless stacks of paper, books, boxes of half-finished candy and random pens away from him, making a nest of his arms around his head. He could feel the sleep calling him away, when the sounds of loud footsteps filled the room, and a slight shadow covered his faint vision through his eyelids. Someone was here.

Bother. Maybe they’d go away if he ignored them? He looked like he was already asleep anyway, and he’d always been good at not letting on that he was actually awake. Still, evidently, this person didn’t seem content to leave him asleep, as a large book slammed down on something on his desk, sending vibrations everywhere. Jirou craned his head upwards, squinting a little at the unwelcome visitor. 

As his eyes refocused on the blob of pink and peach, he realized that it was a furious looking Gakkun. Jirou internally groaned. What now? He loved his best friend, really, but once Gakkun started ranting, he never shut up, unless really surprised. “You missed another meeting.” Gakkun said, sounding very angry. “Director wants my guts on a tiny poker stick for not being able to contact you. Hell, did you not charge your phone again?” he demanded, his hands on his hips.

Technically, Jirou hadn’t charged it at all since Gakkun had last shouted at him about this, because of frequent forgetfulness and general laziness, but details, details. Besides, Gakkun’s speech wasn’t all too interesting, the way his hair flapped when he got mad was much more interesting. Poofy. 

Jirou had always used to love lazily watching Ryou’s hair when it had still been long. It had always drifted nicely in the breeze and the little individual strands had always had a slightly different way of falling to the rest of his hair, which always made it look like every strand of Ryou’s hair had life of its own. At least, until Ryou had been a melodramatic drama-queen and cut all of it off, to leave spiky short hair. And Ryou hadn’t made any attempts to regrow it again, not after he’d got it to ear length and got a comment from Gakkun about how it looked like Taki’s hair. Jirou had been just a little disappointed, but it wasn’t like it was his business anyway. 

Gakkun’s hair was nothing like Ryou’s, just like Gakkun was very little like Ryou. Where Ryou’s hair tendrils had always seemed to have lives of their own, Gakkun’s hair acted all together, in a clump. Kind of like anime hair, but Jirou suspected rather than movie magic, the cause for Gakkun’s hair sticking together was the hairmousse that was involved in keeping Gakkun’s red hair, soft. 

“-- Are you even listening to a word I’m saying, Jirou?” demanded Gakkun, as he shook Jirou’s shoulder. 

“No.” said Jirou, cheerfully, ignoring Gakkun’s splutter at that statement. “Listen, I heard there’s this cool pastry place behind work that opened today, we should go--”

“No, you listen!” said Gakkun, stabbing Jirou in the chest with a poky finger. “You’re really on the risk of getting fired, you know! Atobe’s recommendation or not, you haven’t shown up to a single meeting, and the Director’s pissed off with you.”

“But...I’ll pay for the pastries...?” asked Jirou, helplessly, just wanting to distract Gakkun from the issue at hand. He hated getting yelled at and would do anything to avoid it. He didn’t even know if he had any money on him, but he had to have some spare coins rattling around inside that wallet his sister had given to him on New Years. 

Gakkun looked more than slightly tempted and distracted by the prospect of pastries and Jirou paying, and Jirou pulled his most adorable pleading face to try and get Gakkun’s anger to dissipate for a little bit, at least. Gakkun’s pulled through about ten different emotions and his hands waved at his side, before he finally nodded.

“Fine. But this place better be _good_.” he said, moodily. Though he cracked a smile when Jirou immediately bounced up, with a loud cheer and almost knocked over the large stack of books on his desk. He rummaged for the purse among one of his very messy drawers (he should clean it up soon, but somehow, he never really has the time) before grabbing Gakkun’s arm and pulling him out of the office. 

-

“That is twice the size of your face.” said Gakkun in awe, as the large ice-cream pastry mix was placed down in front of them, smelling absolutely delicious. Jirou grinned happily as he handed Gakkun one of the spoons. “Well, it’s going to be fitting into both of our stomachs soon.” he said, easily, as he took a large spoonful of the tasty dish. 

It had turned out that the wallet had carried more than petty coins, in fact carrying a huge wad of various bills and even a debit card! Which of course, had been occasion to splurge and buy something nice to try and get Gakkun to forget whatever he was trying to say. Upon seeing a bird on their walk to the place, he’d almost started on the topic again, before Jirou had caught one of its feathers and drawn Gakkun into conversation about his feather collection. 

Still, as they appreciatively made their way through the pastry (it was delicious!), Gakkun pulled a face, though he looked less angry now and more annoyed. “Seriously Jirou, you need to be careful. I know that Atobe will just find you a job again if you get fired, because he’s Atobe and generous like that, but you’ll get a reputation after some time, since the science community is so tight-knit. Just show up to meetings, it’s not that hard. You can sleep there too, just be there so the Director doesn’t chew us out about it, okay?” he said, in between mouthfuls.

Jirou pulled a litany of faces, spoon still in his mouth. He got a few giggles from the teenage girls looking in their direction and he waved at them animatedly, not removing the spoon. They all blushed and looked away, so Jirou removed the spoon and turned back to Gakkun, seeing his twitch of irritation at Jirou ignoring him again. 

“I don’t like the Director though...and his meetings are _beyond_ boring.” he said, with a sigh. “I can use that time to nap, or finish a report, or you know, actually do work.”

Gakkun rolled his eyes. “Everyone hates his meetings. But you know, that’s part of being an employee. Not every employer’s like Atobe.” Jirou knew that deep down, but he missed Kei’s way of running everything and how it was relaxed for those who knew what they were doing. He sighed; he really didn’t like this part of being an adult. 

“Fine, fine, I’ll show up for the meetings. You still have ta fill me in about what happens afterwards though.” mumbled Jirou, through a mouthful of cream. “So what happened, anyway?”

“New rules. Nobody allowed in the experimental rooms alone. Or in pairs actually, he discovered some interns snogging in there and they were like five seconds from closing your department’s huge electrical circuit with their bodies.” said Gakkun, with a smug expression and Jirou pulled a face. That was dangerous! Though Gakkun was one to talk, he and Yuu-kun had always been kissing in the weirdest places when they’d still been going to Hyotei. 

“Aaaaaaand?” asked Jirou, as he scooped up a huge scoop of cream that Gakkun had been eyeing.

“Oh, you know that robot chicken that you totally failed on?” Wrinkling his nose in memory, Jirou nodded. How could he forget? It had only managed to wreak havoc, destroy five different other projects, arm the building’s sparklers and almost set the building on fire. It had been the biggest disaster yet and Jirou wasn’t eager to repeat it, which was why he hadn’t touched his work folder for over a week now. 

“Yeah, what about it?” asked Jirou, placing his spoon down for a moment. 

“Yeah, well, some chick managed to fix your robot chicken after catching it. You commented out half the programming, you fucking moron!” Gakkun explained, as he took a large chunk of chocolate, giving Jirou a slight glare for taking the cream. Jirou just shrugged, with a sheepish grin. That might have been a good thing to check, maybe.

“Well anyway, it walks and moves perfectly now. Looks like a proper chicken and everything.” said Gakkun, easily, “And everyone was impressed. So despite you not showing up, the Director decided that we were going to use that as our entry for the annual Science Tourney.”

Jirou paused before he took a large bit out of the huge chunk of pastry he’d managed to get. “Science Tourney?” he asked, slightly skeptically. What was that? He didn’t like the sound of it already. 

“Get this; Atobe’s managed to get all of the major science institutes in Japan to basically choose their coolest idea or prototype, and present it to the country in some big televised show or something. The voting will go in rounds or something and then the winning institute gets like a prize of 10 million yen.” said Gakuto, with an amused grin. 

It wasn’t often that Jirou was ever skeptical of stuff that Kei did, but that was... “Like a high school science fair?” asked Jirou, as he licked his spoon clean of cream. 

“Feels sort of childish right?” agreed Gakuto, with a nod, as he pinched a large strawberry from the bowl. 

“Well, kinda. But someone needs to tell Kei that science isn’t a competition anymore, not really.” said Jirou, placing his spoon down, with a slightly unhappy frown. “I mean, everyone wants the patent first and everything, and anything goes once you have the patent, but when it comes to important discoveries, everyone helps each other. Is how we sequenced the human genome and set up anything astronomically.” he said, with a petulant expression. “Science shouldn’t be a business.”

 

Gakkun shrugged. “You try telling Atobe anything when he’s got his mind set on something. Besides, it’s all about marketing science to the world. Nobody knows jackshit about what scientists do, and he decided that it was high time that people were.” Jirou couldn’t disagree with rousing interest in science, but the method...

“By making it into a TV show.” 

“Yeah, pretty much.” Gakkun said, as he tapped his spoon on the edge of his bottom lip upon noticing Jirou’s frown only get more dejected. “Look, it’s already done, Ji-chan. Just put up with it. It doesn’t really matter if we win or not, our institute is one of the richest in the country anyway, so just go and have fun looking at everyone’s stuff.”

Jirou stuffed the empty spoon into his mouth and nodded, balefully. At least he could go and have a look at what everyone else was doing. Maybe he’d be able to find an experimental partner, he didn’t know. What he did know is that he’d be losing valuable sleep time for something that didn’t seem all that useful. 

“Hey, at least your invention got picked. I suggested mine, and it got laughed out of the room.” said Gakuto, with a deep scowl on his face. 

Jirou giggled suddenly, as he remembered exactly what Gakuto was working on. “Gakkun, the times that the charger doesn’t set on fire when exposed to air, it just doesn’t work!” he said, with an amused laugh. Hydrogen fuel cells were only really useful if you were going to space, because hydrogen was just so volatile. “Of course they aren’t going to pick it to showcase our talents!”

Gakkun had to know that Jirou was right, which was precisely why he got a grape thrown at his face. It bounced off his nose and Jirou caught it with his teeth, triumphantly. Even Gakkun had to be impressed, that was skill! Gakkun sniffed, took another baleful spoon on pastry and stuck his tongue out at Jirou. Jirou reciprocated, teasingly, before he started to eat again. 

-

Blinking a little, Jirou shuffled through the impressive crowd gathered at the huge convention centre. Tugging at the edges of his old and long cardigan, Jirou attempted to push through the crowd to look at the order contest on the first floor, before he decided that he’d go find another one. Knowing Atobe’s organizers, there’d be like thirty posted everywhere, to avoid this type of situation.

Ducking away from a camera that was attempting to hunt down people with the shiny, sparkly name-tags, Jirou found a staircase to run up and in at the top of the third floor stairwell, a schedule order was posted, neatly, without a single person surrounding it. He peered up at the order list. So first they had like three hours for the audience to wander round and stare at the gadgets and have the inventors explain them if they wanted. Then, they started the actual voting, with a tiny prelude to each invention to those in the audience who arrived late or hadn’t cared to look too closely. 

Then the voting happened in sections, with people picking between just two people and voting upwards and upwards, until the votes between the final two victors decided things. Jirou thought it was a little silly, honestly. Half the audience would just be voting for the flashiest thing, even if it wasn’t something that really required a grant. He knew a lot of scientists were gathered here too, but the majority of people were schoolkids and interested tech people, along with a few rich entrepreneurs, willing to give extra grants. 

That was the part that his institute were interested in, weren’t they? A long-term grant from someone rich like that, would be far more useful than a 10 million yen prize, which was why his one-minute of explanation was more like self-promo and the interns manning his table were actively trying to garner interest in the institute and not just the product. Adjusting his skewed bowtie, Jirou walked onto the equally crowded third-floor, to look for their table and little exhibition. He couldn’t see the chicken everywhere and he balanced up onto his tiptoes to try and look for it. Not one glance-- or was that a chicken like figure at the end?

Craning his neck, he overbalanced and collided into the person walking in front of him, scattering said person’s papers and files everywhere. The crowd parted and made a small circle around where he and the stranger quickly bent down to pick up the papers. Luckily, most of the stuff was page-numbered and stapled together in sections, which meant it was easy to hand back to the stranger in order as they both stood up and moved away from the general crowd. 

“Sorry about that!” apologized Jirou, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. 

“Do not worry about it, Akutagawa-san.” said the stranger as he organized all of his papers neatly, flicking through them to see that nothing had been lost. How did he know his name? Right, nametags, he wore one. That was stupid. “You helped me pick them up, after all.”

Jirou took the shuffling time to take a discerning glance at him. He was tall, like Choutarou-tall, which was really impressive! He had black spiky hair, like Ryou’s but even more messy, which Jirou hadn’t thought was possible, and pale skin, that didn’t look like he saw the light of day all too much. His nametag read Inui Sadaharu, which sounded familiar, but for the life of him, Jirou couldn’t remember _why_. 

‘“Everything there?” Jirou asked cheerily, as Inui adjusted his files and pushed up his glasses. 

“Yes, indeed. Thank you again, Akutagawa-san.” he said, with a nod and an adjustment of his steampunk waistcoat. Jirou wanted to comment in it being cool, but he honestly didn’t know enough about that to be able to sustain a conversation, so he just gave Inui thumbs-up. 

Inui seemed sort of close to just walking away, but honestly, it was the first nice conversation he’d had with any of the inventors here, so he was sort of eager to keep it going. Everyone was so snobby, honestly. “So, what’s your invention? Anything interesting?” asked Jirou, with a wide smile at Inui.

Inui looked a little taken aback. That was sort of cute. Clearing his throat, Inui flipped through his papers and showed Jirou the picture of a robotic hand. “It’s a perfectly robotic hand. He reacts automatically to its surroundings, without any prior programming, and can pick up a butterfly by its wings without tearing it, but can also smash through a wall with 100% efficiency.” His voice grew prouder with every word and Jirou glanced at the notes and labels.

“That’s awesome!” Jirou said, as he liberated the papers from Inui and glanced at some other diagrams. “Nobody’s gotten further than making the programming apply to just one type of action, right? So, how does it react to its surroundings and when to use what?”

The inventor smiled, as he pulled out a pencil from his pocket to highlight the sensor motion bars on its wrist. Useful! Jirou wished his cardigan had pockets. It was too big and fluffy to help, and clipping pens to his hair was the best way to accidentally yank out a chunk of his curly mane. “That’s because he reacts to voice commands on some occasions and motion sensors for others. So for instance you want to shake hands with him, you linger in front of him and he will reach for you and shake lightly. If you wave your hand in front of him, within an interval of 0.01 seconds and 1.0 seconds, it will result in him waving back in greeting.”

That was...really cool for something that didn’t have eyes. “And voice commands?” asked Jirou, as he looked through the one packet for something that would indicate the actions to control the hand. The packet was lifted from his hands and replaced with what he was looking for, wordlessly and Jirou grinned at Inui. He was sort of transparent, huh?

Flicking through the papers, Jirou scanned for words that looked interesting, with increasing excitement. “Punch, Pick up, Slap, Poke, Wiggle and directions to do the actions in, su~goi! Has it-he got an inbuilt compass?” corrected Jirou, remembering that Inui had been referring to his experiment as a ‘he’. 

Inui gave him a nonplussed look, but nodded. “Yes, we programmed that into him, after he started punching in the wrong direction and almost destroying the computer we were hooking him up to.” He looked quite sheepish as he finished, which was really funny. 

Jirou giggled, lightly, covering his mouth with his oversized sleeve. “I can imagine that must have been a problem. But I totally have to see this! Show me your exhibit!” And now he totally felt like he was back in a high-school science fair, but this was so cool! Despite Japan being known for its robotic innovations, the work on robotics had really declined in the past few years. Something like Inui’s invention would push the progress on robotics forward. 

Inui nodded as he gripped Jirou’s arm and tugged him through the crowd, with as much excitement as Jirou seemed to have about this. “This project was only 87.5% finished as of last week, but I had to do some quick adjustments in order to make it functional for today. It is, however, the most interesting invention of the lab and was the most likely to win the fund, with a 74% of attracting public attention, so it was imperative that I finished it.”

“I can see why!” said Jirou, as they pushed past some bored looking teenagers and a large group of schoolchildren who were also heading towards the rather crowded stall where the robotic hand was. The interns at Inui’s table were busy explaining to the middle-schoolers about how the device worked. Still, it was layman’s terms, so Jirou ignored it in favour of craning over one of the shorter kids to hold his hand out in a handshake. Inui stand back a little to watch and Jirou tilted his head to the side as the hand turned around slowly and gripped Jirou’s hand, with the right amount of pressure. 

Still....”Poke, 35 degrees North?” he said, hoping that he’d said it in the right order. He’d only really skimmed the instructions. The hand poked in the opposite direction of Jirou, as specified and Jirou pulled a face as he watched it. Damn, it was what he’d suspected. 

“It’s not quite right.” he said, with a slight yawn and stretch upwards. “When it moves, it doesn’t have the action of a hand. Watch. Poke, 35 degrees north.” he said to the hand and did the same action as the hand. In comparison to Jirou’s small hand, the hand looked stiff and just a little too slow. 

Of course, it was impressive that it had the ability to differentiate between soft actions and hard actions, but still. It wasn’t quite perfect. Disappointing, in a way. But it meant that there was room for collaboration and improvement. 

“We saw that in testing, but we couldn’t eliminate it in time for the show.” said Inui, with a grim nod that made his glasses flash in an almost annoyance. 

Jirou tilted his head to the side, and hummed. “Hmm, can I see your programming? You mighta done the same mistake that I did before I fixed it.” Of course, in fixing that mistake, he’d created the chicken of mass destruction: but at least the chicken had moved realistically! The intern closest to Inui hissed angrily before Inui could say anything and Jirou backed away from them, a little nervously. 

“Haha, I guess not?” he asked, with a laugh. 

Inui looked vaguely amused, either by his intern’s actions of Jirou’s reaction. Jirou wasn’t sure which one, but if it was the latter, it wasn’t nice to laugh at other people. “Perhaps you ought to explain where I might have got it wrong.”

But that would take forever and Jirou didn’t like things that took forever. It was boring, in general, to have things that lasted for too long. “How about I just show you my programming?” asked Jirou, cheerfully. “Then you can see what you did wrong.” he said, darting off without waiting for Inui to agree. 

Inui followed, nevertheless, muttering something indistinct under his breath, as he adjusted his glasses. Jirou pushed through the crowd of people, trusting that Inui’s height would allow him to follow Jirou with ease. He was really excited to show Inui his design, despite having been a little reluctant to enter this contest, at first. 

“Oi, Takkun!” he called, cheerfully, to Atobe’s assistant, who’d tagged along to keep records and take pictures on the event. “You have the files with all of the programming stuff?” he asked. That was one of the requirements, right? To be able to show and explain parts of the programming if necessary, so everybody had the copies of their programming with them. 

Takkun, in response, tapped on the tablet for a bit, before chucking it in Jirou’s direction, risking his perfectly manicured nails for it. Jirou caught it midair, despite it veering wildly off-course and almost hitting a child in the head. Grinning, he scrolled down the script, quickly. Inui leaned over his shoulder with ease and blinked as Jirou tapped ctrl-f and searched for the chunk of code that he wanted. 

“Okay, see this increment series, right? You probably have it every thousandth, right?” asked Jirou, circling the code with his finger and sheepishly laughing as the page zoomed in too much. Oooops, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Inui tapped twice on the screen and it righted itself. Cool! People who knew how to use this stuff without pulling the whole tablet apart to feel how it worked. Neat. 

“I had it on increments of every ten-thousandth, actually.” said Inui and Jirou nodded, enthusiastically. “Right, right, that’s not enough! You need to increment it to a billionth, and then the movement becomes smoother. I mean, look at the chicken.” he said, nodding to the realistic thing, that the children were reaching up to pet, and watched in dismay as it attempted to peck them instead. 

...maybe he should have used Ryou-kun’s dog as a source instead of his aunt’s evil chickens. But that would have involved potentially interrupting Ryou-kun and Chou-kun in...whatever they did together in Ryou-kun’s apartment. Besides, with Gakkun’s feather collection, it had been easier to collect the feathers necessary to make it look like a chicken. Running around Ryou-kun’s dog with a lint-brush would have been _creepy_.

“But wouldn’t that incrementation slow down the movement, even while making it potentially smoother?” asked Inui with interest, as he nodded, and scribbled down some notes in his file. 

“Yeah, which means you need to increase the amount of RAM available to process it or use a shared computer system. The cloud helps with that, I got about 67 different idle computers and I use their RAMs to help this along.” Jirou explained, with an excited tone. It was so nice to have someone who was nice and understood what he said. He liked his coworkers and all, but they weren’t the brightest off the top of their heads. 

“Then...” Inui’s pen was flying across his page as he kept doing some sort of math. If Jirou had been taller, he would have peeked at it, but at his height, he was kept in the dark. Literally, Inui’s shadow fell over his face. “Adding the cloud to this system, makes it more vulnerable to hacking. You added firewalls? Wouldn’t that mess up the initial code?”

“Yeah! You’re bright, Inui-kun!” said Jirou, with an incredulous look, easily dropping the formality. Even he hadn’t figured that out until the robot chicken had wreaked havoc on the entire institute and by then, it had been too late! This guy was smart! “I didn’t catch that for a while, which meant the code got corrupted for a bit, actually. But someone else fixed it for me. I think they added a stability section of code to account for that? Which means it now works like that.”

They paused to watch it fluff its wings and settle itself down on the table, like it was brooding over its eggs. Inui let out a breath of air. “You’ll most likely win, Akutagawa-san.”

“Nah.” said Jirou, cheerfully. “Chickens aren’t cool enough. And none of these kids will vote for it, that’s for sure.” he said, with a light laugh, at how one of them seemed to cringe away from the beak. “Bad chicken.” he called to the chicken, and only got irritated clucking in response. The children laughed and Jirou waved to them, cheerfully, before he felt a yawn coming on. Oh. 

Inui tilted his head. “I wonder...my previous data on you was wrong, and the data I have now gathered about your invention is very different to how it was described....I have my doubts.”

“Previous data?” asked Jirou, curiously, with another large yawn. 

“Yes, from middle school. Akutagawa Jirou, aged 14, one older brother and one younger sister. Father is Manager of the largest branch of a laundry shop and mother is daughter of a major CEO. Sleepy and often missing from practises, but one of Hyotei’s best tennis players. Known for your flexible wrists and very adept volleyer. Idol was Marui Bunta and favourite subject was Technology.” Inui recited and Jirou tilted his head, until he saw Inui from a completely sideways perspective. This was really, really familiar. 

“Hmmm...which school d’you go to?” asked Jirou, as he started to tilt his head more upside down. There were definitely people looking at him funny, but he had to figure out why Inui Sadaharu was a familiar name and it probably had to do with the unfamiliar orientation of his face. He’d seen most people in middle school from upside down. He’d napped a lot more back then. To his credit, Inui didn’t even look fazed by this contortion. 

“Seishun Gakuen. Tezuka was our captain?’ he prompted, gently and Jirou hummed. He recognized Tezuka’s name, because Kei obsessed over him on a monthly basis. Jirou had never understood that. His playstyle was cool and all, but nothing to be excited about. Sorta boring, honestly. Not like...oh, the school of Fuji! This was the tall megane who’d been standing next to Fuji on the sidelines a lot! 

“You’re Fuji-kun’s teammate!” said Jirou, snapping his finger at Inui in excitement. “The data player that Gakkun liked to complain about!” It all made sense now!

Inui smiled and Jirou returned it, with a wide grin that was quickly interrupted by another yawn. Damnit. He was tired and he really needed a nap. 

“I’m going to take a nap now, so I’ll see you at the contest?” asked Jirou, as he tugged at his bowtie, with a little annoyance at how it had gotten askew again. 

“Ah. I shall see you in 2.5 hours, Akutagawa-san.” Inui said, with a slightly stolid nod. Jirou waved, and loped over to the small bench behind their display, and curled up to take a quick cat nap. One of his interns looked annoyed, but didn’t say anything. Good. Jirou was really, really tired, but he was glad to have met someone nice and conducive. Maybe at the end of this, he could work on a project with Inui-kun or something. 

-

He didn’t manage to wake up by himself, but luckily, Takkun managed to push him blearily awake when the competition speeches were required. A couple of boring ones about chemistry components were presented, and sure, they made sense, but they weren't even candidates to win any grants, not with how bored a lot of the audience looked. And then, it was Jirou’s turn. The large sheets of paper were in his hand, carefully typed out, with stage cues from the institutes scientists, but honestly, as Jirou skimmed it quickly on his way up to the podium, it sort of felt a bit boring. 

“Hiya everyone!” he said, cheerfully, stuffing the paper into his side-pocket, to the dismayed looks of the three interns and Takkun. “I’m Akutagawa Jirou, inventor of the robot chicken. Umm, I guess you want to know why? I made this design after living with my aunt for some time, who had chickens and I was sorta inspired, because they have a sort of jerky movement at times, but a smooth movement at others seemed like the perfect kind of animal to showcase robotics, yanno?”

He could see Takkun quietly facepalming and one intern looked close to tears, but the people in the audience seemed more interested already, by Jirou’s informal language. 

“It was really tough to programme, and it took me like five or six months? Longest project I’ve ever done, and lots and lots of time at the scratching board. And yanno, a project like this requires collaboration, which means, even if they didn’t want to, the whole institute was sorta drawn into my design, and I into theirs. Which is good, because I’m a physics and mechanics person at heart, but to get things like this right, you need to know a lot about biology too!” he said, cheerily. “I think we don’t do enough of collaborating, despite it being one of the biggest reasons that we even got so far in science!”

“Ummm...” he trailed off, looking at the timer that was counting down. Gosh, a minute wasn’t much time at all, was it? “I guess that I want to tell you to look into our institute and the research we do, because everyone does really really cool stuff, that we love having arguments about in our breaks. And if you want to, vote for the robot chicken too! Because it was a lot of work. Not that other projects weren’t. But you kinda need to pick something you find cool and interesting, right?” He was self-destructing and that one intern was sobbing real tears. Ouch. 

“Basically, vote for us!” said Jirou, with a slight wave and a low, earnest bow, almost hitting his head on the edge of the podium. That was embarrassing. Maybe he should have stuck to the script. At least the applause he got was louder than it had been for the others. 

Two other people weren’t really a good selection pool though, if he was working with statistics. Jirou winced a little as he took his seat and felt Taki’s dangerous smile from over his shoulder. Yeah, yeah, he’d screwed up. How did he get his way out of this...? “Hey Takku--”

“Shut up, I’m listening to the other contestants, so I can play damage control through lunch.” hissed Takkun, and Jirou sunk down into his chair, with a little bit of a forced smile. Oops. 

He mostly tuned out of the other contestants, almost drifting back to his nap, before the name, Inui Sadaharu jogged him out of his reveries and he leant forward, with a bit more interest. Inui was organized, in a way that Jirou wasn’t and he adjusted his papers, precisely before he leant forward to adjust the microphone. 

“My name is Inui Sadaharu, and I’m here to talk to you about Experiment Component 567A, otherwise known to most of my institute as Zhoumi. Zhoumi is a robot hand, formed and designed to be able to attach onto another robot if necessary. We decided to work on the second-most difficult part of the body first, as a test of our ability, since few robot hands have ever worked out to completion.”

It was sort of boring, Jirou had to admit. While Inui’s language didn’t contain so many technical terms as other presentations, it wasn’t as arresting as it could be. He supposed presentation was something they could both work on. Zhoumi was a cool name, though. 

“Zhoumi has the ability to both hold a piece of paper between his fingertips, but also to be able to crush an apple into pulp and juice. Stronger than a human by around 54.5%, though this strength can easily be increased. Zhoumi is also easily controlled by voice command and by computer commands, though his voice recognition patterns are only limited to Japanese for now.” Inui continued. “It is important to remember that Zhoumi is part of a set and that his legs and his face are also going through important renovations. We hope to finish up with Zhoumi’s entire body in about three to four years, depending on how much funding we can receive.” 

Inui bowed, with less than a second to spare on the clock and that was pretty impressive timing that he’d managed to get. Jirou wondered how much he’d practised. But now, since he had no reason to stay awake, anymore, Jirou drifted asleep. He didn’t see Inui-kun again for the rest of the conference, which was a shame. 

-

“- so science really isn’t a contest and there are infinitesimal reasons why pitting the institutes against each other was a bad idea.” finished Jirou, from where he was sprawled out on Kei’s lap, and where Kei was running his hands through Jirou’s hair. They had done this through most of middle school, and honestly, even if it was a little childish, Jirou sort of understood Kei’s need for some sort of comfort when he spent most of his days ensconced between some of the old geezers that ran the business world. 

Kei just raised an eyebrow. “And what would you propose next time to try?” he asked, leaning back .

Jirou sat up, instantly. The thing about Kei was that he was always open to all sorts of suggestions and Jirou had been thinking about this, in between mooching off Gakkun’s roommate’s cooking and bugging Kashi-kun to tell Jirou more about what space was like. “Well, I was thinking, if you want to drum up interest in science, you should pick like one member from each institute, the cool members! Then, stick them in a reality show house and make them collaborate on some easy science stuff for people to watch and to think is cool! Then you can have little glimpses of the actual facilities and what we do there, so people know, right????”

Kei tilted his head and nodded, approvingly, as he tapped his long fingers against his face. “Wouldn’t the projects take a long time? Not everyone is as fast as you, after all.”

“Well, if you run it through with the scientists at the facilities, they can throw up some half-finished projects for the scientists to work on together for the sake of TV and then it reduces the time, right? And gets a lot of stuff done.” Jirou asked, shrugging, carelessly, as he settled his head back in Kei’s lap. 

“Are you volunteering?” asked Kei, slyly and Jirou scrunched up his nose. 

“No thanks. Public speaking just...isn’t my forte.” Jirou said, in between a large yawn. Kei’s fluffy couch was always a great way to make him fall asleep all too quickly. He always had to try and resist sleep so he could make the most of his opportunity with Kei, but Kei seemed to like Jirou falling asleep and doing work when Jirou was napping around, for some reason. “Send Gakkun, or someone else funny. Besides, I want to collaborate with someone else without the aid of TV.”

Kei raised an eyebrow, as his hand came down to rub though Jirou’s curls. “Ahn?” he asked, with interest and Jirou grinned, smugly, as he made himself more comfortable in Kei’s lap. 

“Nuh-uh, Kei, you first. I heard that you got to see Tezuka-san the other day. How’d it go?” he asked, with a very interested expression. 

Kei never missed out on the chance to talk about Tezuka-san, even if he was curious about Jirou’s exploits, so quickly launched into an account about how amazing Tezuka-san looked in the dawn light, and how they’d played the best game of their lives, and how he’d missed tennis. Jirou nodded in the right places, made commiserating remarks about how Tezuka was still ignoring Kei’s advances and smiled where possible. He was glad that Kei got to see Tezuka-san so frequently, but Jirou’s input about what to do wasn’t necessary, so he didn’t pay as much attention as he could have. Kei just needed someone to listen to him talk, so he could sort through it verbally. They were both sorta similar in that way. 

“Just ask him out next time, instead of flirting.” At this point, either Tezuka’s sense for flirting was faulty or Kei just wasn't making himself clear enough, and Jirou was starting to suspect the latter. The thing with Kei’s generous, friendly manner with everyone was how people couldn’t distinguish his kindness from his flirting, which had led to all sorts of misconceptions in the past. 

“Perhaps.” said Kei, vaguely, which Jirou took to be a no. Jirou didn’t press it; eventually Kei would give in and just ask Tezuka out, in some extravagant manner that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. And if he didn’t do it soon, Jirou would force his hand. “So, your collaboration?” Kei asked, and Jirou let his eyelids flutter shut. 

“Mmm, met someone from the old tennis courts at the gala. Probably the best thing about the whole thing. Inui Sadaharu? Fuji-kun’s teammate! He works in robots too! His stuff is reeeeaaaally cool and he picks up on stuff really easily, but he’s not quite there in making things move smoothly. Was thinking that I might try and build a properly realistic robot body with him.” Jirou commented, as he tucked some of his hair behind his ear. “I don’t have his number though, that kinda puts a cog in the bolts.”

With an apology, Kei stood up and reached for his box of numerous mobiles. He’d managed to cut down to just five during high school, but as more and more smartphones had been released, Kei had managed to build back up to his old collection size. He dropped one of the older models of iPhones in Jirou’s lap and nodded. “His number’s in there, somewhere. You can search for it in your own time.”

Jirou nodded, with a disarming smile. “Thanks Kei!” he chirped, with a grin, as he straightened up and tucked the phone into his pocket. He sort of had trouble with phones and charging them, but mentioning that to Kei wouldn’t be a good idea, because then Kei would do something extravagant, like getting him a new phone every time it died. Or hire someone to charge phones for Jirou. 

“It’s your birthday soon, Kei.” murmured Jirou sleepily, as he leant his head against the padded material of the blazer. “You got anything planned?”

Kei shook his head as he exhaled lightly and shut his own eyes, looking a little pinched. “It’s nothing big; don’t worry about it, Jirou.” Jirou pulled a slightly annoyed face. Kei was always like this. In his mind, he never mattered as much as his friends. It wasn’t something healthy to think. Still, he wouldn’t push it. Surprise parties were more fun anyway, he could ask Hiro-kun what they could do. 

Jirou hummed as the exhaustion settled over him, finally, and the fluffy feeling of the sofa drifted him away to sleep. 

-

“So what, you think that it’s not a good idea, Hiro-kun?” asked Jirou, as he waited on the park bench, where he was supposed to meet Inui-kun to discuss things. Most times when he had to wait, he always napped, but since Hiro-kun had finally called him back, Jirou had been forced to put off his nap time for later. 

“Usu.” said Hiro-kun, quietly. “Keigo has enough animals to take care of with the aging Beat. You may wish to stick with something more electronic and less alive.”

Jirou pulled a face as he tilted his head to the side and wracked his brain. He’d been brainstorming a cool thing like google glass, that was more like a small patch on your wrist, but that would take some time to make, which he most likely wouldn’t have. Maybe he could get a cool and low maintenance idea from someone else? It was always difficult to get presents for the man who had all the money in the world, he mused, darkly. The only thing that Atobe wanted was Tezu-oh. Well, that could be arranged, couldn’t it?

“I’ll figure out something. But you’ll deal with the venue of the party? All the food and stuff? And I’ll work on inviting people that Kei actually likes?” said Jirou, tugging at one of the longer blonde curls. 

“Usu.” said Hiro-kun, and the sound of people on the other side made Hiro-kun’s deep, even breathing move away from the speaker. Jirou paused for a little moment, until Hiro-kun’s breathing returned. “Jirou, I must depart. I will send you an email when I have confirmed everything.”

“Arright! Stay safe, Hiro-kun!” said Jirou, waving to him, even if Hiro-kun couldn’t actually see him. The phone tone ended with a beep and Jirou grimaced at the battery sign. Urgh, there was like 2% left, he definitely had to charge it, if he remembered. 

With a large yawn, Jirou leant back against the bench. He was just starting to drift away, when a light touch to his shoulder startled him up. “I’m awake!” he spluttered as he straightened upwards and tugged at his t-shirt self-consciously. 

“Akutagawa-san.” sad Inui, with a smile. He seemed to dress a lot more casually away from conferences, and it totally suited him better. The suit hadn’t quite fitted properly and it had been obvious, especially with his height.

“Inui-kun!” said Jirou, with a grin, as he got up to shake hands with him. Ooh, he had nice hands. Calloused, like all sports players, but a pretty light grip on the handshake. Honestly, Jirou didn’t like the people who crushed his hands in a handshake, which was already a great point in Inui-kun’s favour. “How are you doing?” 

“Not all too bad. This week has been 5.7% better than last week.” said Inui, with a nod and Jirou laughed, with an easy stretch.

“No more glares from your boss for not getting the money, right?” he asked, with a sheepish smile. Inui nodded, with an amused look in return. Neither of them had won the prize, the money going instead to an interesting experiment involving people’s senses and projection. Jirou wasn't all too fussed, since their institute had gotten some sponsors despite Jirou’s screwup. If it wasn’t enough for the Director, well, Jirou didn’t really care about the Director’s opinion. 

“She seemed rather frustrated that I had been boring with my topic.” Inui said, dryly, “She wanted to know how I’d made the process of using robots seem boring to the general populace.”

“Ehh, your delivery could have used some work, but it was still sorta cool. You shouldn’t mind what she says.” said Jirou, with a sunny grin. Inui just nodded, looking a little disoriented and Jirou grinned, happily, as he wrapped his arms around one of Inui’s long arms. “Come on, I’m hungry, I want some cake. We can talk about collaboration at this cool cafe that I know!”

Inui let himself be steered away easily, and that was the second sign that Jirou was going to like him a lot. 

Ten minutes later, they were seated in a nice cafe that Jirou frequented often, after realizing that Marui-kun worked there. Today wasn’t one of the days that Marui-kun manned the tables, but Jirou liked it, despite that. “So,” said Jirou, as he dug into a small slice of ice-cream cake. “Do you want to build a robot?” he asked, in a sing-song voice. 

Inui blinked, as he sipped his milkshake and Jirou cheekily added: “It doesn’t have to be a robot.”

“Well, it would be difficult to have it be anything other than a robot, since androids are frowned upon. Are you suggesting that we build some other sort of machine?” Inui said, looking a little confused and Jirou shook his head, with disappointment. 

“You haven’t seen Frozen yet. I am disappointed.” he said, with a mock frown on his face. “We should do that sometime soon.”

“Build a robot? I assumed that was the purpose of this meeting.” said Inui, and at Jirou’s perplexed eyebrow curl, he just smiled. “And perhaps watch the movie too.”

Oh, that was good! He’d totally pulled Jirou’s leg. Jirou laughed, as he dug his spoon into the ice-cream cake. Oh, he’d missed this cake; he hadn’t ordered this in forever. “Disney princesses aside, you said that Zhoumi was just the most complete part of the robot you have, right?”

“Yes, that’s correct.” Inui said, as he pulled out a folder from the inside of his jacket. Jirou envied the size of his pockets already. His screwdriver tended to fill up his jacket pockets too quickly. He unfolded the papers and showed Jirou a series of blueprints for the various parts of the body. The entire leg and hip model was called Michael and the head was called Daisy. Interesting. The arms were called Raj and Jirou had never seen such weird naming conventions. It was awesome and quirky. 

“So Daisy is the only one we have not got prototypes for. To be honest, nobody has wanted to touch the idea of trying to programme an entire face to react to things said or even to speak when spoken to.” Inui said, his glasses glinting a little, as Jirou perused the designs thoroughly. “That is what I need the most help with. The others can all be done with enough time and bashing.”

Jirou pulled a face. “Ew, bashing. Why would you do that? Just make a recursion loop with the appropriate equation, Inui-kun.” he said, as he pushed the other blueprints away and glanced at Daisy, spoon hanging from his mouth. Hmm. A face. Would be difficult, but hey. Jirou appreciated challenges when they didn’t involve people being angry at him. 

“Well, it is not as easy as it may seem. A lot of these functions cannot be made into efficient enough equations.” Inui pointed out, as he took another sip of his milkshake. Well, that _was_ true.

“Stiiiiiilllllllll, an inefficient equation is better than bashing for every femtosecond or something.” retorted Jirou, as he removed the spoon from his mouth and stuck it back in the ice-cream. “It would have to be really minute measurements of time, since all of these things have to be really subtle facial expressions, right?”

Inui conceded that, with a nod, and while inflating his cheeks and prodding them alternatingly, Jirou contemplated the situations. “We’d haveta do a lot of observations of how people react to stuff. Like someone really expressive, since I don’t think we can get the expressions of someone really reserved like Tezuka-san or something, just yet.” he said, with a morose look at the sheet. That was a lot of work. 

“Or, you could just look in the mirror.” pointed out Inui, sensibly. “You are a very expressive person, Akutagawa-kun.”

Jirou nodded, grimly, and Inui straightened a little, leaning forward on his elbows. “It’s not a bad thing.” he clarified. “It’s useful, in fact. If there is a facial expression we are struggling with, you can make it and we can use you as reference. It also makes hiring a model less difficult. It is best that we start with observation of your various facial expressions and how they are made.”

Jirou tilted his head to the side, in contemplation. “Should we get one of those creepy anatomy dolls with all the muscles that pull at what to get the facial expressions?”

“No need, there is an online model online where you can specify which muscle to pull, though admittedly, not how much.” Inui said, as he started to scribble something down in a notebook that appeared to have come from nowhere. Huh? Where had it come from? Jirou looked around them with a little confusion, but passed it off as one of Inui’s quirks. “From there, we can compare it to your face and perhaps create our own online model from that, with variations on how much the muscle is contracted or expanded.” 

Jirou nodded, as he got out of his seat opposite Inui and squished up next to Inui’s part of the booth, so he could look down at what Inui was writing. Oh. The other man was sort of warm, and even if he was kind of bony, he was also pretty comfortable. Jirou settled down next to his shoulder easily, to look at what Inui seemed to be sketching, with more ease than Jirou had really expected.

“Oh, it looks good.” said Jirou, as he watched Inui’s pencil fly across the face, making a pretty good sketch of an average face. “So what, Daisy’s got to have voice recognition, and then her face changes according to that? And we cross-reference with my face?”

Inui nodded, as he adjusted easily for Jirou’s position. “Exactly.” he said, with a pleasant smile and that was the third and final sign that Jirou was definitely going to like working with him. 

-

As Inui pressed the last of the motion sensor pads to Jirou’s face, Jirou scrunched up his nose. “Cold!” he complained, as the gel pressed against his warm skin with insistent fervence. Inui just smiled with a sinister nuance, and Jirou let his face fall back to a more neutral frown. The motion-sensors sucked, but he understood why they had to do it.

After about a week of trying and failing to use the online face mimicking software, he and Inui had thrown in the towel. It had just been too tedious and inefficient to sufficiently model what they wanted. So instead, Inui had suggested that they use the software that most animators used for photorealistic animated movies. And of course, since they had decided to use Jirou as a cross-reference for Daisy, he was of course the model for the photorealism modelling equipment. But, it was cold!

“I am going to start the software in 10.0 seconds exactly, so get ready with a neutral expression at first, Akutagawa-kun.” said Inui, as he typed away at the computer. Jirou shifted on his seat a little and exhaled, in preparation. He was really sleepy, now that he was forced to do a test. He bit down tightly to prevent the large yawn that threatened to engulf his expressions and wondered whether he looked bizarre.

Inui was certainly giving him a weird look and Jirou shot him a weak smile before the 10 seconds was up and Inui started the software. “Alright.” said Inui, quietly. “Hello Akutagawa-kun. How are you doing?”

They had decided to make Jirou’s expressions more natural by having him answer questions in the way that the robot probably would and then using those responses in the robot, instead of Jirou just making random expressions on command. Those always looked more stiff or exaggerated, he noticed. Still, he was still a little annoyed that Inui hadn’t let him see the questions in advance, saying something about it ruining the natural reactions. 

It made _sense_...but it didn’t have to mean that Jirou liked it. 

“I’m doing good, thank you!” he said, with a sunny smile. “How about you?”

“I am doing well.” said Inui, with nod, as he pulled out his notebook and jotted something down on it. Jirou felt a little curious as to what he was doing, but tried to not let it show on his face. Focus. That was important. “Tell me, what are your opinions on animals?”

“Cute!” said Jirou, without pause, before remembering that he wasn’t supposed to be answering for him, but for the robot. Shoot. “But I wouldn’t really want too many around me. Since I have a delicate hardware, it would be bad to be knocked over by a large animal, or have my hardware destroyed by a small rodent, which most humans keep as pets.” he said, as he tried to ponder about what a robot would say and how they would feel it.

Sort of like spontaneous acting. Jirou had always fallen asleep in drama class, but Ryou-kun had always been good at this sort of thing, and he tried to remember how Ryou-kun functioned. 

“You dislike things that can knock you over?” asked Inui, curiously and Jirou shrugged, before remembering that his shoulders weren't hooked up to the system and that it was a bad idea to do that. 

“There aren’t many organisms that enjoy being one-upped or destroyed by another. I am also one of those things.” said Jirou, carefully, picking his words carefully. Was this affecting his facial features? Probably. Still, Inui didn’t seem to be entirely unhappy by the results they were getting. “I would have a preference towards an animal that would help me rather than hinder me, however.”

“What are your opinions of humans?” asked Inui, his gaze darting up and Jirou almost laughed at this. Oh wow. That was opening a whole different can of worms. What would a robot think of humans? If he went down an Asimovian ideal, robots would be programmed to like and treasure humans, but if he went down the route of Tezuka Osamu, some humans would alternatingly dislike humans as well. He assumed that Daisy was someone who would like humans, however. All proto robots had that characteristic, right? “They’re my creators! I exist because of humans. It is difficult to have an opinion either way, but it is generally positive.” he said, with a wide smile. 

“Do you believe that cynics have something correct about the nature of humanity?” asked Inui and Jirou pulled a slight face. Who was going to ask a prototype robot that question, anyway? It would be more likely that most would ask them about what they could do, rather than what they thought. These questions really did seem like Inui was fishing for Jirou’s own opinions. 

Shifting in his head seat, Jirou glanced upwards. “Mmm...I think they must obviously have something correct in their stipulations, but since I have yet to meet a human who is completely cruel in every way, I think that my cynicism is limited. To truly understand someone, you have to walk a mile in their shoes. Since I am a robot, I will not have the same experiences as a human and I will not think the same way.” Jiru sort of wished that Inui would ask him these questions normally. Answering in the capacity of the robot while filtering out his own opinions, but still trying to show Inui what his own opinions would be was _difficult_! He was totally getting a headache. 

“You should ask me other questions. To ask a robot about human philosophy is to only garner vague answers.” hinted Jirou, widening his eyes, and Inui laughed. It was a nice sound, and it didn’t happen often enough, in Jirou’s opinion. Still, it had only been a week, and they both only really knew each other in the terms of an experiment. Maybe they needed to go do that Frozen watching session or something, as team-bonding. 

He’d never understood Kei’s need for team bonding, but he sort of got it, now. After all, he hadn’t been an outsider like Kei, trying to make friends. He’d already had good friends at the beginning of middle school, and so team bonding had been unnecessary. Now....well, he sorta understood why being an outsider trying to make friends was tough. 

Inui flicked a page and scanned it, his hands following the letters. “Alright, what do you think of people who do not believe in evolution?”

Jirou scrunched up his nose and shuddered. “Oh no.” he said, with a petulant face, not even bothering to change his dialect. “They suck. They need to go back to school and pay attention, and if they don’t, my superhuman strength can be used to throw a textbook at their head. Perhaps then, they will achieve a little of the information through osmosis.” he said, with a slightly mischievous grin and Inui adjusted his glasses, looking quite amused. 

“That is violent for a robot.” commented Inui and Jirou pulled a pensive face.

“Perhaps.” said Jirou, carefully, forcing himself to sit on his hands and not disrupt the detections of the motion sensor pads on his face, by his erratic hand movements. “But to not believe in science is to put the people around you in danger. It is the responsibility of any members of society to remove dangers, and education is one of the best ways to remove danger.”

Oh goodness, this was so difficult. Jirou had already decided; the next time they did this, Inui could sit in this seat and try and pretend to be a robot with cold gel patches on his face. There were too many things to be thinking of and the overwhelming urge to yawn had returned. Not to mention, he really wanted to scratch his cheek. 

“What’s one thing that really makes you sad?” asked Inui and Jirou definitely couldn’t use his own answer. Jirou knew his weakness was seeing his friends sad. But of course, a robot wouldn’t think like that, right? 

“The fact that I will never feel.” said Jirou, simply, and his mouth pulled down at the sheer thought. He was someone who lived with his heart and his head equally. He really couldn’t think of a world without that stabilizing influence of his heart. 

Inui nodded, and there was a slight change in the way that the air felt now. Had that been too serious? Too honest? Jirou’s fingers twitched from where he was sitting on them and he yearned to move from the position. Standing up, Inui stopped the recording and snapped his notebook shut, neatly. “Would you like a break, or to do another recording?”

Jirou yawned, letting his jaw drop wide. “A break, I think!” he said, rubbing at one of the motion sensors uneasily. “Do I take these off...?”

“You can leave them on,” said Inui, as he pulled his chair closer to the computer, tapping away at the keys and doing something with the data. He probably had to pay attention to that, right? With another yawn, Jirou moved his chair up close to Inui’s and peered at the screen as well. He was more tired than he’d expected, the numbers were blurring together a little. 

Jirou leant over to the side, seeing if a change in perspective would help things, but instead, he bumped against Inui’s shoulder, which was broad and slightly comfortable. And that was the final straw, as Jirou leant his head against Inui, and took a small nap break. He could deal with the data himself, Jirou trusted Inui to do that well enough. 

-

“What???!!!” demanded Gakkun from the phone, and Jirou moved it away from his ear, with a slight wince, as Gakkun started ranting. He’d sort of guessed that his sub-clause to attending Kei’s party would cause a little frustration for most people, but he’d known it was probably one of the only ways to give Atobe his gift.

“Gakkun, I know that girl in Marketing likes you.” said Jirou, interrupting as Gakkun paused for breath. “Just ask her nicely and she’d be happy to go with you. Or ask Yuu-kun to go with you as a date.”

He could almost hear Gakkun rolling his eyes. “Yuushi’s definitely got some date lined up. He’s a radio DJ, everyone loves his voice and he has no trouble with girls.”

Jirou pulled his lip into his mouth. Was he going to be the one to ruin Gakkun’s perception that Yuu-kun was actually smooth with women because of his voice? He felt like it was going to be a huge disappointment if he told Gakkun how Yuu-kun managed to say things that usually offended them, instead of complimented them. “You can find a date! I believe in you! Fighting!” said Jirou, before he hung up, turned off the phone and threw it away from him. 

There. Sorted. Gakkun would sulk the next time they met up, but he’d show up at Kei’s party. 

“Date?” asked a voice from behind him and Jirou jumped as he turned around. Inui was just too good at sneaking up on him!

“Yeah, for Kei’s birthday party.” said Jirou, sunnily, as he tried to calm his beating heart. “I’m trying to set up him and Tezuka.”

Inui paused momentarily from where he was hanging up his coat and frowned at Jirou. “Does Tezuka know about the party yet? He hasn’t mentioned it.”

Pulling a face, Jirou shook his head. “Don’t have Tezuka’s number. Hiro-kun said he’d get it for me from one of Kei’s phones.” He yawned as he rubbed at his eyes and stretched out his neck. Ow, he hurt all over. At least he’d gotten some work done.

Over two weeks, they had managed to get a stop-motion replay of most of Jirou’s basic emotions and had started to work on programming it into the robot. Of course, that required technology that was delicate enough to be able to make those features, and metal with silica covering wasn’t going to cut it. Which had meant some...experimenting on Jirou’s behalf and some probably slightly unethical ‘borrowing’ of parts from other parts of the facility. 

“You’re here early, Akutagawa-kun.” said Inui, quietly, as he booted up his laptop and glanced down at the fragments of wiring and squishy putty everywhere. 

Jirou grinned sheepishly, as he yawned and picked up his tweezers again. “Never left, actually.” he said, guiltily. “I just had this hunch about the way that the mouth was going to fit together and I think it worked. Just need to wire it up to a stand and see how it work.” he said, as he picked it up and manipulated the two sections, none-too-carefully.

“Alas, poor Yamaguichi! I knew him well, Hinata.” said Jirou, staring down solemnly at the mechanical skull, before grinning at the silently cracking-up Inui in the other chair. Jirou couldn’t help but laugh himself as he carefully placed the sections back on the table. 

“In the original version, it was Yorick.” said Inui, after he had recovered and Jirou grinned, without too much shame.

“Never read the original thing. Yuu-kun said it was good, though, so I found the manga and read through that...but Yuu-kun wouldn’t speak to me for like a week after I told him that.” he said, with a light grin. Yuu-kun had found it a travesty as a literary connoisseur, but for Jirou, who had found that most books put him to sleep, the manga version had been a bit of a blessing. 

Inui laughed again. “There’s a 87.6% that an old friend of mine would have forced you to read the book if he had heard that.” he said, as he started to tap and work on the computer programme. 

“Well, it’s a good thing that he hadn’t.” Jirou said, with a sly smirk and Inui just agreed, with an amused murmur. Jirou felt quite buoyant, even as he yawned and started to attach more and more wires to delicate capacitors and circuit boards. Geez, he’d forgotten how much fun this could be, after almost a whole month working with just computers. 

“Do you need to take a nap, Akutagawa-kun? You have been working all night. I can hook Daisy up to the computer.” asked Inui and Jirou felt his face twitch up into a warm smile. Not only had Inui treated Jirou like a responsible adult who was old enough to deal with long hours (unlike the vast majority of his friends), he seemed very understanding about Jirou’s need to nap. This was earning Inui a lot of plus points. 

“No, I’ll be okay. I’ll take a nap once it’s done. Thank you, though~!” said Jirou, easily, with a wave of his hand. “Besides, I like working with this sort of stuff. Computers aren’t really my thing, unless I get to take it apart and really fiddle with how the electronics work.” he explained, as he carefully poked at the connections. 

Inui nodded. “You’re friends with Mukahi Gakuto, whose father owns an electronics shop.” he said, and Jirou nodded, with surprise. Wow. Gakkun hadn’t been kidding when he’d been complained about Seigaku’s data player knowing everything. Inui was kinda omniscient. 

“Yeah, kinda grew up around Gakkun’s dad’s workshop. Gakkun was never that into it, because he and his dad fought all over all sorts of shit and it reminded him too much of his dad. But yeah, I loved that stuff.” Jirou said, with a conspiratory smile. “I was good at it, too.”

“I always preferred math to other sciences.” confessed Inui, himself, as he tapped away at the computer, his fingers flying across the speed at some high-speed, “But my friend said something once and he said that ‘mathematicians have got to be able to apply their knowledge, or it’s useless.’ So I went to physics. I haven’t regretted it.”

“There’s something cool about being able to spend my days something out of a sci-fi manga.” said Jirou, with a grin, as he managed to attach a delicate part to the jaw. “Less deliberate explosions, mind, but it’s really fun anyway.”

Inui nodded, with a warmer smile than Jirou expected. Jirou’s eyes crinkled in reply and he turned back to back to his work, pulling close to see the smaller details to attach the screws. It was difficult work, especially when he was getting slightly sleepy, but he didn’t want to stop this work halfway through. He’d already been distracted by Gakkun’s phonecall and Inui’s arrival.

 

His eyes flickered over to where Inui was running through the computer programme, bug fixing and increasing the efficiency of the equations, and Jirou smiled. He would have been able to work better on the physical structure without Inui, but he would have made none of this software without Inui’s genius. Not to mention that Inui was pleasant to be around, with his constant mumble of words and numbers his breath as he worked, and his nice atmosphere. It was one of the most comfortable collaborations Jirou had ever worked on (albeit the only one so far), and Jirou wondered why he hadn’t done this before. 

Right, there was nobody this nice except Gakkun, and well, he and Gakkun were in different fields of study that didn’t need to work together explicitly. Jirou worked on making robots, and well, Gakkun worked on powering gargantuan stuff up (though mostly on the explosions that happened after that). Jirou giggled to himself as he remembered the liquid nitrogen going wrong and exactly how _panicked_ Gakkun had been. 

Oh! “We should watch Frozen, sometime soon.” said Jirou, cheerfully, out of nowhere, as he paused his work. 

Inui stopped mid-mutter and looked up at Jirou with a little confusion. “Pardon?” he asked, politely.

“I said we should watch the movie, Frozen, soon. Maybe this Friday? We can watch it at my place, there’s a huge flatscreen in my living room and I have a comfy sofa. Can’t cook though, so we could order out or something. A night off or something, just the two of us?” Jirou asked, tilting his head to the side. One of the night outs, like his karoake sessions with Ryou-kun or his video-game days with Kashi-kun, as he tried to convince Kashi-kun to sneak him onto a rocket into space. 

Inui flushed a little and shook his head, rapidly looking down and away from Jirou “I-I can’t. Not on Friday, 100% not.”

Jirou deflated a little. “Oh. Alright. Maybe another time?” he asked, trying to mask his slight disappointment. 

“Y-yes!” Inui said, with a fervent nod, turning even redder. He looked nearly as red as the wallpaper on Anna’s castle in the movie. Jirou wondered what was so embarrassing about that. Was it because Frozen was a kid’s film? “I would be more than happy to, Akutagawa-kun.”

Jirou smiled back at Inui. “Tell me when you’re free and we can do it.” said Jirou. It wasn’t like he had much of a life outside of his work. Just Kei’s party. 

-

Three weeks later and Jirou wanted to bash his head against the wall. They’d hit a huge problem and they had spent the good part of 24 hours on the problem─ _before Jirou had promptly fallen over_. He kind of felt bad for just passing out on the table, and when he came to, he found himself laid out carefully in the break room, which meant that Inui had taken the time to move him.

With a yawn and a stretch of his limbs, Jirou wandered back into the room, where Inui, with a large, steaming cup of coffee was working on the coding, and the tweaking simultaneously. He looked very exhausted, but he didn’t make a single mistake as he started running through the procedures, speaking through it aloud to make sure it made sense. That was a programmer thing; he remembered his roomie in college had done it a lot. 

Jirou almost felt like he needed to run in and help, but he knew that he would break the concentration that Inui currently had going. Instead, he yawned and watched from the doorway, until Inui got sufficiently tired that Jirou could step in. 

It was sort mesmerizing to watch, even if Inui wasn’t doing much too exciting. He seemed to sweating as he slowly moved the components of the face around a little, to connect them to slightly different areas and his sleeves were rolled up for once. He also worked a lot faster than Jirou, mostly because he wasn’t prone to getting distracted by trains of thought. That probably helped. 

In what seemed like just a moment, but actually managed to be half an hour, Inui finally paused in working, to take a few deep sips of his coffee, and Jirou slipped into the room and crouched down next to Daisy’s face, which was coming together. “Just read me what I have to do.” said Jirou, giggling a little as Inui almost choked on his coffee in surprise. He wondered how many people had managed to sneak up on him, and he thought that it probably wasn’t many. “Or I can do it myself and you can go sleep.”

“N-no need.” said Inui, as he recovered his breath. “There is only 35.6 minutes work left. We can do it together.”

Jirou nodded and made sure that he stayed on task, as Inui started reading the numbers, his voice a little hoarse from his coughing fit. Jirou worked fast, trying to not be distracted, as he connected the various circuits, jiggled them to test they worked and forced himself to not experiment with outcomes, and just rely on what Inui had programmed. 

In less time than Inui had predicted, they finished and Jirou held his hand up to Inui’s for a high-five. Inui returned it, with a goofy smile and Jirou laughed, happily at the sight. It was cute! “You should go and sleep, Haru-kun.” he said, trying out for a nickname and smiling a little as Inui’s eyes widened. “You want me to walk you home? Or you could just nap here.”

Inui shook his head, as he ran a hand through his messy, black hair. “No need, Akutagawa-kun. I will not be able to sleep after drinking a litre of coffee. Let’s work on attaching the skin, instead.”

Jirou pulled a face, as he tucked some stray strands of his hair behind his ear. “Let’s test the corrections work first, don’t want to attach the skin and then discover an error. Oh and just call me Jirou. All my friends do.” he said, his voice slightly faster than usual.

Inui seemed to have noticed it, if the pensive look was any indication, but he just smiled. “Alright, Jirou.” he said, as if testing the sound in his mouth, and liking it. “Let us test it out.”

Jirou grinned as Inui ran the programme and the green light on the side of the model started flashing. It was on, good. “Hello Daisy!” said Jirou, waving.

“Hello! How are you?” asked the robot in his voice. The expressions were difficult to detect in the machinery but hearing his voice was slightly disconcerting. Jirou pushed that aside as he started into the script they had for now. Obviously, they would have to change the programming a little, to get the true random technology, but the emotions was the important part and getting those to work with the right words was the first step. 

Jirou leaned over Inui when he finished, and quickly typed ‘quit’ into the programme, as watched as the green light turned off. “It works. We can put on the skin tomorrow, I think.” said Jirou, with a slight yawn. “But I think both of us need to rest for a bit. Wanna take a nap?”

After a moment of hesitation, Inui nodded and Jirou grinned, as he got up from his seat and stretched up to his tip-toes. “Let’s jan-ken for the sofa in the breakroom. That one is the best for napping.”

-

Stifling another yawn, Jirou shifted his weight to his other leg. “Roses. White roses.” he repeated, patiently. Once again, there was a flurry of noise on the other side and Jirou exhaled again, before the phone seemed to be abruptly silent,

“Excuse my assistant, repeat that one more time for me.” said Yukimura Seiichi, his tone clipped. 

“Oh, hi.” said Jirou, with a slightly surprised look. Oh right, Yukimura Seiichi worked at some flower shop that Kei liked, while he was not gallivanting around the world selling paintings. “White Roses. Like 30 normal orders of them.”

“Atobe.” said Yukimura, without pause and Jirou laughed. Kei was sorta predictable in that way, right? 

“Yeap, his birthday party. You got the invitation, right?” asked Jirou, cheerfully, as he shifted his weight again. He knew that Kei found Yukimura Seiichi annoying, but that they liked to banter nicely, in any case. 

“Of course. Is it alright if I bring my sister as my date? I am a little too busy to go and actually find someone to ask.” said Yukimura, his tone lazy, as there was the slight rustling of a pen and paper being summoned.

“That’s fine, don’t worry about it~!” said Jirou, with a light shrug. Everyone just had to bring a partner and dance, so it was inevitable that the two dateless wonders of Tezuka and Atobe would be forced together. It didn’t necessarily need to be a romantic date. “And delivery needs to be made for the estate at least three hours before the party, so the servants have time to arrange them nicely.”

“Will do.” said Yukimura, his voice concentrated. “30 orders of white roses, 3 hours before the party, Delivery to Atobe’s place?”

“Yeap~” chirped Jirou, cheerfully. “Thanks, Yukimura Seiichi-san. See you at the party.”

“Yes, goodbye, Akutagawa.” signed off Yukimura, and Jirou hung up with a yawn. He wanted another nap. But he’d already left Inui with the robot face for some time, having just woken up from a three hour nap, and it was probably time to either switch off or do some more programming. As expected, the model worked perfectly with a face, though, it was still sorta creepy to see it moving, especially when it spoke with his voice and looked like one of his brothers or sisters or something. 

He supposed there was going to be a certain element of “uncanny valley” from something so close to imitating human life, since it wasn’t quite alive, but wasn’t far enough from being human to dismiss it. Grumbling a little, Jirou rubbed at his eyes and loped down the corridor of the scientific institute, waving at one of the interns who was running back towards the chem lab with a large box of goggles. 

Sidestepping the teen, Jirou hummed as he popped his head inside the small lab where he and Inui had been working on Daisy quite successfully, when he paused at the sight he saw.

Was Inui kissing the robot? 

...it was kinda hot.

Jirou blinked twice, wondered whether it was intruding on a special moment and whether he needed to go in the other direction, like when Gakkun and Kashi-kun had sometimes been snogging in the closet, or whether it was the cough and interrupt it thing like with Ryou-kun and Chou-kun. After deciding that the feelings of the robot didn’t matter, in the end, Jirou coughed, loudly. 

Inui sprung away, his cheeks red as he realized what he’d been caught doing. 

“I-it’s...got a programme for kissing...I wanted to test if it was working...” Inui muttered, as he adjusted his slightly askew glasses. Jirou nodded, feeling his own cheeks heat up a little, as he walked forward towards his computer.

He paused awkwardly and reached up to smooth down a particularly messy tuft of hair. “It was...sticking out.” explained Jirou, not exactly sure why he was flushing as well. 

Inui nodded, swallowing heavily. His adam’s apple bobbed and it was rather prominent, actually, kinda like Hiro-kun’s. Jirou found himself staring a little, before he turned away, quickly. Maybe that had been one of those things where he should have walked away and came back later. 

“So....” Jirou said, awkwardly, as he scratched the back of his neck, and took a seat at his own computer, trying to will away the red from his cheeks. He’d walked in on Ryou-kun and Chou-kun nearly sexing each other up. This was nothing. “You want to start programming some other stuff into Daisy?” he asked, trying to move on.

Inui seized upon that quickly, as he grabbed his wheely chair and pulled up to his computer, mumbling something that was probably assertion. Jirou managed to open the programming window in fifteen minutes but no code came out of his fingers, and he noticed a similar lack of work from Inui at his side. 

...they had to talk about this, didn’t they? Jirou scowled as he glanced down at his keyboard. He wasn’t good at this. Problems in maths, problems in science, problems in tech- those were easy. But if it involved conflict or something going wrong with someone he cared about... Jirou would rather run from the issue forever, even if he knew it was ridiculous and would end up, in Ryou-kun’s eloquent words, biting him in the ass.

“I....I am sorry if that startled you, Jirou. I assure you that my usual mode of working is not kissing robots.” Inui started, with a slightly self-deprecating smile. Jirou giggled, unable to help himself. 

“No, you wouldn’t get much done, right?” asked Jirou, with an amused smile and Inui conceded that, tilting his head to the side, his face still flushed. 

“It was good data.” was all that Inui mumbled. “Sorry for startling you.”

Jirou’s head popped up and frowned at Inui’s messy hair. Good data? He didn’t really think that robots could kiss all that well. Why would it be good data if you’d programmed the robot to make the kissing action yourself? There was no spontaneity in Daisy, not yet. So if it wasn’t data for the kiss itself, it was data for what? 

Jirou’s eyes slid over the the decapitated head and frowned at the face. Okay. The face had gotten less like his brother and looked eerily like his own face, if he had possessed glass eyes. Also, if he was bald, but that was another matter. So...was it data on Jirou?

“Haru-kun, I’m going to bet you at least 1000 yen that I can kiss better than Daisy.” Jirou said, as he sat on his hands, feeling his cheeks flush a little again. If he was wrong about this, he was going to give up on that scheme for Kei’s party, because he couldn’t speak about someone else’s love-life if he couldn’t deal with his own. Still, he kinda thought that he wasn’t wrong about this. They’d blushed a lot around each other, and Inui definitely went off-topic when they talked about the experiment sometimes. 

Inui turned around at Jirou, with a slightly embarrassed look, but his voice was steady when he asked: “Is that a testable hypothesis?”

“I dunno, could be.” said Jirou, with a slightly mischievous grin. “There should be an abstract first, then a question about the worl--”

“Question: Is it possible for a robot to be a better kisser than a first-time kisser?” asked Inui, interrupting Jirou, as he leant forward, one eyebrow pulling upwards. Alright, that worked. 

“Alright, so now we formulate experiments. You’ve already tried the trial with Daisy, so I guess you’ll have to do the trial with me.” said Jirou, standing up as he walked over to Inui. How had he known that this was Jirou’s first kiss? Oh yeah, he was omniscient. Hmm. Jirou could live with that. Power for good and whatnot. 

Jirou leant down to kiss him, and it was slightly awkward, and a bit too wet and Inui’s glasses dug into Jirou’s nose, but when they pulled away, Inui had a goofy smile on his face and Jirou felt rather smug, as he plopped himself on Inui’s lap.

“You owe me 1000 yen, And an apology to Daisy, her first kiss was taken away without any permission.” Jirou said, before Inui leant back in for a repeat trial, his hands wrapped around Jirou’s waist. Oh yeah, this was better than talking about it, anyday. 

-

“Your bow tie is crooked.” murmured Jirou, as he reached up to straighten the green bowtie. Inui looked far too good in formal wear, more so than Jirou ever did. But as Ryou-kun had laughed one day, he and Jirou were made to wear jeans, unlike the rest of the Hyotei kids. The flowers around them dipped from the walls themselves, and Jirou thought that Hiro-kun and the butlers had outdone themselves on this. 

“You aren’t even wearing a normal one.” pointed out Inui, from where they were seated by the staircase. Some people were already dancing, like Ryou-kun and Chou-kun, who were tripping over each other’s feet and laughing anyway. 

“Clip-ons are better.” dismissed Jirou, as he watched deliberately as Hiro-kun bought in a blindfolded Kei to the top of the staircase. He scanned the crowd for Tezuka and thankfully found him next to Yuu-kun and Yuu-kun’s elder sister, close to the front of the crowd. Hiro-kun glanced down to Jirou, who gave him two thumbs up,and almost wobbled off his chair, until Inui steadied him. 

Hiro-kun pulled off the blindfold and Kei’s eyes opened at the party. He looked only momentarily surprised, before he laughed, magnanimously. It was the warm pleasant laugh that Jirou had always liked to hear from Kei and Jirou leant into Inui’s side, as Kei descended down the staircase with Hiro-kun at his side, no doubt wishing some words of gratitude to the taller man.

Jirou waited until Kei had reached the bottom of the staircase before he stood up from his chair and quickly made his way over to where Kei was greeting some guests. 

“So, what did you think?” asked Jirou, as he found Kei’s side and grinned, cheerily. 

“This was your doing.” said Kei, with a raised eyebrow and Jirou winked. 

“I don’t deserve any credit, Hiro-kun did all the hard work for all of this! I’m not nearly good enough for this!” Jirou said, dismissively. It wasn’t like he was good at organizations or details on colossal scales. “My present to you is currently dateless on the dance floor, confused as to why he isn’t out practising tennis right now.” he said, with a cheerful grin. “Maybe _someone_ should go an offer him a good time.”

The realization dawning on Kei’s face was a beautiful thing, and Jirou was glad that he was surrounded by old Hyotei classmates, because otherwise it wouldn’t have quite felt fair to let anyone else see Kei looking this bewildered. “Well, go on then.” piped up Ryou-kun from the side. “Tezuka might just lose himself on the courts if you aren’t fast enough.”

Kei shot Ryou a haughty glare, gave Jirou a look that promised a talk later, but gracefully moved away from the main crowd, towards where Yuu-kun and his sister were taking their leave from Tezuka to go and dance, since it was their favourite song. Jirou was sort of tempted to watch and see whether it went okay, but then again, Kei really couldn’t screw up something like this, not on his birthday. Besides, he had other stuff to do.

Like the tall, pale, handsome scientist who was still waiting at their chairs. Jirou darted through the crowd, after waving to a couple of pretty young alumni of Hyotei, before pulling to a stop in front of Inui. “Want to give dancing a shot?”

Inui nodded, as he stood up and offered a hand to Jirou. “I warn you though, I have two left feet. If we are making Michael once we have assimilated Daisy’s patterns to those of Zhoumi, we will be using you as a model.”

Jirou laughed, as he pulled Inui out to the dance floor. “What makes you think I’m any better?” he asked, with a teasing laugh. Inui’s face as he considered that was golden and Jirou laughed again, at the idea of a robot that tripped over itself while dancing. That would be next on the list, now that Daisy was almost done. 

A real life robot. Jirou wondered how that would change things? Could people end up dating robots? Marrying robots? Would robots even have rights? There were so many questions that so many authors had already tackled and that Jirou could cite as examples, but in the end, Jirou could only wait and watch what would happen to his creations. 

He smiled up at Inui again, who smiled back at him, and Jirou decided to leave the talk of robots to where they could sit and debate it, over one of their long all-nighters. Now he was here to dance, not work. “Come on, pick up the pace, slow-poke!” said Jirou, grinning as he started to jig a little, making Inui laugh. 

Things were going to be just fine.


End file.
